The day to day disruption is quite frankly awful. This will take a while for Rail to recover from, and it is sad to see.
The downward spiral is on, I can only predict severe cuts to May23 TT, with routes being cut particularly where there is duplication.
Is anyone else just thinking of throwing the towel in on rail for the time being? What used to be fun, certainly isn’t anymore. Car for travelling is certainly pushing towards the norm
While there are certainly no quick fixes available to the railway, perhaps not even for the duration of the current “government” due to industrial relations issues, since the Dec 22 timetable is unusable, owing to an uplift in service on most lines which cannot be resourced leading only to an increase in random cancellations rather than service, reductions in May 23 could actually increase reliability, especially where certain operators run far outside their area (e.g. GWR to Brighton or Southern to Milton Keynes) removing “competition” but not leaving any lines unserved, I like to think of the future of the railway.
I however do not own a car and am not the only person not to, so using public transport (when not walking and cycling) is very much normal for me and as as such I am well aware of how to navigate the precarious situation buses and trains find themselves in and still find the current railway to be quite reliable and customer friendly compared to the buses.
TPE only delayed me 30 mins going out and 0 mins (but I had to run for a change) on the way back.
I'm in this boat to be fair. I very rarely use the train nowadays as the bus is so much better and generally far cheaper. Even with a shortage of bus drivers in the UK, it still tends to be more reliable than trains.
For some perhaps! Despite the disruption on the railways, I still find it more reliable than the buses!
Bus travel round here is deteriorating a lot more than the railways.
Deterioration is the word, but the buses may be deteriorating due to their inability to pick up the slack from a deteriorating train service.
I have been doing a bit of commuting recently, 1 day a week. The last time I used TPE (12 Dec, the only day of the full timetable so far!) they only delayed me by 4 hours 15 minutes, with the first 6 services cancelled, of which I intended to use the 3rd and the 7th being 15 minutes late, but more recently I attempted the same journey using a 5 connecting buses in the morning and while this went without a hitch, on the return using only 2 buses I lost well over 4 and a half hours first with 3 buses arriving displaying the correct number only before leaving refusing to allow any passengers on and then the oldest vehicle in the fleet, a 15 year old single decker arriving to pick up over 100 freezing passengers, leaving most of them behind and then arriving at the bus station 10 minutes after the last connection before an hour and a half gap, with the next bus cancelled and the one after that 40 minutes late, it took me 8 hours. The train takes 1.
I have also been having problems at my local bus stop which I use most days with the driver refusing to stop for me due to unknown roadworks, leaving me with an hour wait in the evening, when I could have easily walked a few feet to the next stop. Today I had to get home for a parcel to be delivered and the buses were all either too late or had their invisibility cloaks activated and I ended up having to get 3 buses doubling back twice in the absence of the correct one. After that I went on the trains and after wading through an increasingly long list of cancellations (one I noticed was due to late arrival of an inbound service, despite only being 4 minutes late…) and standing in the middle of the aisle the whole way amongst hundreds of passengers being crammed into 3 carriages, crush loaded of course, I made it where I was going in a timely fashion and then even came across a Class 197 on the return, complete with empty cans of Strongbow already. Judging by the passenger experience, the railway isn’t finished just yet.
). I'll probably continue to take the train to pop over to Cornwall & if I really need to go to London, but I'd certainly look at flying up north - not that that is really any different to before anyway, XC has always been far too time consuming - and road options for anywhere east on the s. coast.
